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Biography of Zachary Huang, formerly Zhiyong Huang. Original name in Chinese: 黄智勇

Zachary Huang is an associate professor in entomology at the Michigan State University. Zachary grew up in a small village in Hunan and attended an agricultural college in China (first batch of college students after the cultural revolution). During the early 80s, he obtained a national scholarship to study honey bees in Canada. After obtaining his Ph.D. he moved with his family to University of Missouri at Columbia to work with plant mites. One and half year later they moved to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and returned to honey bees again. November 1st, 1998, he came to the Michigan State University as an assistant professor. He became tenured and was promoted to be an associate professor Oct of 2004.

At MSU, his main responsibilities include research, extension, and teaching. He is known for developing the social inhibition model (at UIUC) which explains how nurse to forager transition is regulated, the mitezapper (MSU) which is a non-chemical control for the infamous Varroa destructor, his cyberbee.net (started in 1997 but developed mainly at MSU) for extension, and award winning photographs. He was awarded the J.I. Hambleton Award for Outstanding Research by the Eastern Apicultural Society of North American Inc. August 2008 (one honey bee scientist per year is awarded).

As a two-time winner at an International Photo Contest, I am an avid beetographer (a photographer who is very dedicated to photographying bees, coined by myself, May 4th 2005). My artistic photos are at www.beetography.com, and photos related to extension are at cyberbee.net/gallery. I currently use a Nikon D700 and a D70, both purchased with personal funds.

Zach's other web projects

TweetProblem: There are R codes for calculating LC50 or LD50 using 4 to 6 data points. However, none uses control mortality correction (e.g. Abbott correction). There is an ecotoxicology package which does this, but it seems hugely complex to use. Solution: In the code below, we put the last line as the control mortality (dose=0), […]

TweetAugust and Sept is a tough time for honey bees. Goldenrod is starting but not going strong yet around late Aug so honey bees are always trying to find something good for them. Two good plants bloom around this time: China sumac and seven son’s flowers. I noticed last year (Aug 22) that a large […]

TweetThere was on post (June 23rd, 2016), I was begging everyone to show me if they saw honey bees foraging on catalpa leaves. No one responded. On Sunday June 26, I finally had the luck to see honey bees foraging on the back of catalpa leaves. I was going to give up after waiting for […]

TweetAt the Friday lab meeting, I was told that one colony has become all “laying workers” by a visiting scholar in my lab, so I decided to take some photos the same day. I have seen workers backing into cells before, to lay eggs but at that time I did not have a digital camera […]

Tweet(rewritten from “the lady in red”) The crocosmia sings: You are dancing with me I become red, cheek to cheek There’s nobody here I hide, you seek You bury deep in me To take all my honey But I hardly know that your beauty is so bright It outshines the sunlight 1. 2. 3. Chinese […]

TweetOk, I have seen bees foraging on catalpa flowers, many years ago. In fact here are some pictures I took, in 2005 (date stamp: 2005-06-18 10:31:24). I remember this was in Okemos, behind the Quality Dairy Store near Grand River and Dobie. At that time I did not notice that catalpa leaves also have extra-floral […]

TweetContact(s): Mark Kuykendall , Zachary Huang New insights into the reproductive secrets of one of the world’s tiniest and most destructive parasites – the Varroa mite – has scientists edging closer to regulating them. “If you know your enemies better, you can come up with new ways of controlling them,” said Michigan State University entomologist […]

TweetThis blog continues from last time, in trying to generate “long data form” required by R (or any survival analysis, for that matter, such as SAS or SPSS), from “short data from” which is easier to input and can reduce errors. Using “times=N” last time was not very neat, so this is another method, looping […]

TweetIn my last blog, we successfully reproduced the SAS method for survival analysis, but it was a pain (and error prone) to do one line each for one testing subject. In other words, if on day 10, you had 50 dead bees, you will have to enter 50 lines of data! With the help of […]